Marv's Blog

Copilot pricing overhaul and alternatives

It is the classic, you find/use something that fits your usage and you seem to hop on the train just the moment before it changes direction. Not long after my post on copilot pricing, Copilot decided to move onto usage based pricing, allowing me to cancel my yearly subscription. In the meanwhile, I also quit my personal claude subscription as I kept hitting the limits faster than what felt fair (which they seemed to have "fixed" with additional datacenters by now).

Copilot lost its unique selling point and my trust towards anthropic has been somewhat broken. I don't see why they would not just half their limits again, leaving customers in the same position as during my last post.

A colleague at work has been checking out ollama, who - in addition to the option of running models locally - also offer a cloud subscription with hosted versions of open-source models. I decided to give it a try, while being a bit worried/curious how well working with models works out, without someone else building some context infrastructure around them for me.

Their free tier is already very generous and if you don't try to be crazily productive with it, it is sufficient. It did not withstand my peak usage patterns though, especially since I have been toying around with hermes. I decided to opt with the pro plan for 20$ a month which I have been unable to max out so far.

This post feels a bit shallow, this is not a real test or comparison of the providers, but rather a search for alternatives. I may write about my experiences with the open models a bit more in the future. For now this post serves more as a followup to my thoughts on copilot, as they had to shift :)